Unity Comes to Linux: Experimental Build Now Available

Hello again, lovely people!

Last month, I wrote a blog post detailing our plans for Unity on Linux. Well, I’m back again to tell you the big day has come; today we’re releasing an experimental build of Unity for Linux!

An Experimental Build

Today’s build is what we call an experimental build; future support is not yet guaranteed. Your adoption and feedback will help us determine if this is something we can sustain alongside our Mac and Windows builds.

Today’s build is based off Unity 5.1.0f3 and comes with the ability to export to the following runtimes:

Linux, Mac, Windows Standalone

WebGL

WebPlayer

Android

Tizen

SamsungTV

System Requirements

64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or newer (just like our player, the editor will run on most ‘modern’ 64-bit Linux distributions, but official support is only provided for 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04 or newer)

Feedback and Issues

We’ve created a new section of the forums for you to provide feedback and report issues. That’s the primary place where we’ll be communicating with our users who are using the Linux build, so be sure to check it out. Crashes of the editor will pop up the bug reporter, which we encourage you to use in that case (because we’ll get the stacktrace).

234 Comentários

Guys do not forget that the very Unity 5 is a beta version and so errors in reporting as stated above phenomenon is understandable (see in google). It does not depend on whether you are running on Linux or in Windows.(broken English from google translate, sorry)

Is there a place to express interest in future unity versions for Linux? Unfortunately I won’t be making use of this version as it’s not up-to-date. But I’m very interested in Unity for Linux overall, having the editor is a deal maker (or breaker) for me.

“future support is not yet guaranteed”. Well ok, this is great and all but if you guys really can’t be bothered to guarantee support, why on earth should I use Unity instead of Unreal. You say you want people to adopt Unity, but why should I spend energy with broken builds on my chosen platform if at the end of they you turn around and just say it’s all too difficult and pull support.

I downloaded Unity for Ubuntu andso far it’s been great. However, I just into a little problem, wondering if any of you know anything about it: when I’m in an animator controller (state machines), I simply cannot create state transitions. Right clicking on the state will pop up the menu that you get when you click on the background, and I do not have the “Make transition” option.

Awesome news. Please support the linux version. I am developing Android apps and use Ubuntu as the only os. I have now a 3d App and moved from Rajawali to Unity because of this update.
Thank you so much.

It’s not going so well. Lots and lots and lots of OpenGL shader bugs that cause frequent crashes in Ubuntu. Unreal 4 for Ubuntu is much more stable, but it doesn’t have near the assets I want and need.

One of the important things in the works is the rewritten OpenGL support. So you probably only need to wait a bit more. Also, there is a dedicated forum section for the Editor and bugs. You should look there.

I should add to my post below: I’ve tried Unity for Linux on Xubuntu 15.04 and Fedora 22 using identical hardware. For Xubuntu, I used the Official Debian package. For Fedora, I used the platform-agnostic build, which I’ve found to be the most stable thus far.

Wow. This is great. For the record, I’ve found the unofficial, platform-agnostic build to be much more robust and stable than the Official Debian build. The Debian build crashed just about every session, but no crashes so far on the platform-agnostic build.

As a Linux user, I had given up on the possibility of using Unity after several years of countless people requesting a version able to natively run in Linux (without Wine or similar Windows emulators). Just by chance somebody had asked if I had ever used it or tried it and I came to get an update on any changes since I had stopped even checking up on Unity’s developments. I am impressed that Linux users are no longer dismissed as a trivial and easily-ignored demographic anymore, though to be honest, not impressed with how long it has taken thus far.

However, now there seems to be a few other issues which I feel should be addressed. Particularly that it is only available for 64bit Linux installations, which tend to have significant stability issues with some applications I use on a daily basis. All potential “fixes” to those issues require 32bit dependencies, which most often fix one thing while breaking another.

The only truly stable and reliable method is to only use one or the other, 32 bit or 64 bit, and avoid anything requiring dependencies to combine the two on a single system. So while my issue is that I stick with 32bit so as to have no issues with the applications I need most, I also agree with those who run strictly 64bit systems in not wanting subordinate elements designed as 32 bit components.

Would it ever be possible to get something as stable and straight-forward as separate 32 bit and 64 bit versions? I can only run 32 bit on my system, so Unity is still a “no go”, and if history is any example, it will likely be several more years before the option is even considered. MEanwhile, if in those years, more applications get their 32 bit -vs- 64 bit stability and dependency issues sorted out and I do switch to a 64 bit system, I would not want to dedicate the additional space and other system resources to dependencies or libraries just so 32 bit components can be used with 64 bit components.

I’m facing an problem:
Today I tried to run the Unity Editor in Command Line In Ubuntu:
”
/opt/Unity/Editor/Unity/ -nographics -batchmode -quit
”
It worked in Graphics interface but Crushed in Pure Command line interface and throw that:
”
Aborted(core dumped)
”
Can I get more help to fix that.

Amazing!!! I was waiting for this like for-ether :) Now testing with my projects and writing windows a good bye letter :)) Unity was the only one keeping my primary development on windows. Amazing job Na’Tosha & Unity Team!!!

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gratifying work.

I have problem on Fedora 22 i alwes get stuck on pls do surwey page ;) it newer shows surwey and when i duble enter it asks me to fill crash report, anywey so heppy Unity3d supports linux worst case scenario will install ubuntu

I sent an e-mail to the support team on 3rd December 2014 asking how hard it would be to create a port of Unity for Linux, given that there is an Mac version, once Mac is based on Unix. It didn’t sound hard to port for me. However, Ben has answered me it would be impossible. Although I may have planted a seed that now is growing stronger now. I am glad of you Na’Tosha, congratulations.

Wow! Finally! On the one hand I’m super excited about that because I always loved making games in Unity, on the other I would maybe never have learned low-level programming by trying to make my own game engine if not for the lack of Unity on Linux.

Hopefully in 2-3 years we won’t need to keep a Windows partition for anything ever.

At the moment I can’t seem to import any assets when I right click and click import assets. Is this a bug or not? Also, could anyone gimme the file for the vehicle pack (inbuilt) so I can use it? Thanks

But then I never liked Monodevelop much anyways and have always used simple code editors. I ve heard from other people on here that Visual Studio is great with Unity and I might try it with my windows partition, but if I m looking to move to Linux it s a no go anyways.

This is a GREAT start, but please, stop limiting it to Ubuntu users,,, as you can tell by a lot of the comments in this thread- a LOT of Ubuntu users don’t know what to do if “point-clicky” doesn’t work in Linux.
Please build an rpm, I will try with the .sh I downloaded.

Those games aren’t made in Unity and it would probably be a fairly major undertaking to develop Linux versions of them. It’s entirely possible of course, but the publishers are unlikely to consider it until Linux becomes a larger market opportunity.

This is so exciting. I’ve been waiting for this for years. Its been nice to build for Linux, but so disappointing that I always had to use Windows to do it. Thanks for all the hard work, guys, and I hope the Linux port eventually becomes official!

1. When 5.2 will be released, is that very hard to foresee you will be able to compile Unity for linux again?
2. In case of future updates, will them happen through “check for updates” menu or via a new *.deb file (manual update)?

I just started using Unity at work about a month ago and have become fond of it, and wanted to start a personal project at home. To think, I was considering installing windows… phew that was a close one. I hope this makes its way out of the experimental phase into full blown supported!

I have waited and prayed for this for years. Finally, I can be completely free of the Windows cancer. Unity 3D was the only Windows program I’ve had to keep using, everything else I use is linux software like Blender, Gimp, gEdit, etc.

32-bit platform makes no sense for me in 3D developing. It’s ridiculous. I’m surprised Unity 3D still maintain 32-bit versions of Unity Editor. The efforts should be focused on the 64-bit Linux editor instead. I see three equivalent 64-bit Unity Editors: Windows, Mac and Linux. It seems clear and reasonable.

Definitely not trolling but I might be confused. I don’t plan to develop, only play. specifically smaller games my machine can handle. For example a game called Vega Conflict is browser baser and runs unity however it doesn’t run on my machine, even after trying pipelight I am confused by the whole debacle. I’m hoping that some amount of linux specific integration would help this issue but I’m definitely not at the level to say yes or no here.

Well, you are clearly not understanding the difference between Unity Player and Unity Editor. Games built on top of Unity engine can be ported to any platform that has Unity Player compatibility. But to actually develop and create games you need the Editor. The Editor is what was released recently, Player has been on Linux for some time now. Thanks to it’s presence we can play Kerbal Space Program for example.

AWESOOOOMEOO!! Please keep going with this! I am always forced to use Windows for work for many years now! And I hate windows! I hate it so much… It is for sure the source of all evil.. (besides Apple of course)

You can just extract the tar file contained in the installation script and copy the files yourself like it’s done here https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/PKGBUILD?h=unity-editor (If you use Arch, you can just use the AUR build. Obviously.) As you can see, the script is not being executed. “ARCHIVE=$(awk ‘/^__ARCHIVE_BEGINS_HERE__/ {print NR + 1; exit 0; }’ $pkgname-installer-$pkgver.sh)” gets the line numer where the tar begins, and “tail -n+$ARCHIVE $pkgname-installer-$pkgver.sh | tar xj” simply outputs the archive to stdout where tar can read it over stdin.

What is with the 32bit requirement? Can’t you build Unity for Linux as 64bit only? I sure as hell am not installing a 2GB editor and an additional 500MB of 32bit subsystem that blows up GNOME 3.16 on Debian just to try this out.

What is with the 32bit requirement? Can’t you build Unity for Linux as 64bit only? I sure as hell am not installing a 2GB editor and an addtional 500MB of 32bit subsystem that blows up GNOME 3.16 on Debian just to try this out.

Na’tosha Bard, 2 years ago I visited the Unity offices in Copenhagen and I have a faint memory of possibly spotting you there. If I would had known what you were doing (or were going to do) for the Linux community I would had shook your hand and thanked you in person. But instead this internet message will have to do. Thank you so very much! I am extremely grateful!

Hardware-wise, I’d expect it to run, but maybe not as nicely as on a more powerful machine.
I think you’ll need to be running a “normal Linux” instead of ChromeOS, though. (Maybe somebody will prove me wrong!)

I doubt you would be able to run it on a chromebook running chromeos (although, in theory ,it’s probably possible), but if you are running Linux on it then you should be able to run it. I’ve at least managed to run the windows version of Unity5 through Wine on a Acer Chromebook c710 running Ubuntu 14.04. (although it was a bit too unstable)

I can test this native version on my Acer C710 with Ubuntu 14.04 and get back to you if you want. :)

LOL, you are the man! I’m running crouton on all of my chromebooks and have been able to get a fair amount of native ubuntu software running. The biggest challenge is the low amounts of memory on chromebooks, although I’ve heard that some people use SD cards to alleviate things. I think you should try to install unity on a chromebook and report back to all.

HD space is not an issue on the C710 as it had a 320gb HDD. ;) Although I did replace it with a 60gb SSD. Note that my C710 also has maxed RAM (4GB)

Note that I got regular Ubuntu 14.04 on this C710 with an open source bios (I think it was called Seabios) so that I am not running Ubuntu on top of chroot, nor with the chrubuntu script.

I just tried installing Unity, and although I haven’t done any thorough testing it seems to be working quite fine. It was actually quicker at starting up than on my custom built i5 PC (with same distro) for some odd reasons.

So yeah! All is good here! I might do some more thorough posts in the forum when I have more time.

If you’re on Ubuntu, just open the .deb in Ubuntu Software Center (and read the release notes post in the forum – some platforms, e.g. Android, have additional external dependencies, just like on other platforms)
On other distributions, you’ll need to install your own dependencies (also discussed on the forum) and run the self-extracting installer script.

We do have an initiative in place to open the source of parts of the engine where we can – for example, the UI system is (mostly) open source. You can expect to see more parts of what we develop joining it there in the future.

Unfortunately, just dumping all the source code on a public server somewhere is not an option, not least because we integrate third party technologies and platform modules that are not ours to publish.

I think it probably has more to do with the fact that Unity wants to control the feature set so they can sell future licenses. How are you going to convince me to buy Unity 6 when I’ve already implemented the features that you’re trying to sell me?